Page 125 of In Somnis

She’s offering me everything that is gone, and I am sitting here in a dream mall holding her hands, and I want it so badly it makes my teeth hurt.

For one terrible second, I feel it. The pull of it. My mother’s voice, the smell of her kitchen, the weight of her hand in mine. Tessa across a prep counter, laughing, alive, present, and mine again. Every door that closed is swinging open.

One full second where I almost say yes.

But then I remember who is missing her just as much as I’m missing my people.

“What about Nora?” I ask.

“What?” Tessa frowns.

“Your mom. She’s still alive, Tess. She misses you so much. She walks me up to your room and holds my hand in the hallway.” I watch her face carefully. “What happens to her if you just… never wake up again?”

“She’d be okay. It’s not like it would change anything for her.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“Lenny—”

“And Derek?” The name comes out before I’ve decided to say it. “I met him, he’s my landlord now, actually. He’s very nice, and he has a cute little daughter…” I trail off when Tessa goes very still.

Shit.

“Tess?”

“He chose this,” she says, and there’s an edge in her voice I’ve never heard before. “He let me go. He made that decision, and I’ve been paying for it ever since.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t⁠—”

“You don’t know what it’s been like.” The words come out fast, the first real crack in the careful surface. “Years, Lenny. Years of being…”

She stops.

The pain is real. Whatever else is happening here, whatever shape this conversation is being pushed into, the pain underneath it is Tessa’s. Her real pain. Derek-shaped, over a decade deep, and still bleeding.

I watch her close her eyes, one slow breath in through her nose, and when she opens them again, the crack is gone.

The Tessa I know is composing herself like she always did before exams, service, or walking into rooms she didn’t want to be in—chin up, breathe out, move forward.

It’s so completely her that it hurts.

“Come with me,” she says, steady again. “Please. I need you to let go.”

The fountain stutters.

“You need me to let go,” I repeat slowly.

“Of everything that’s keeping you in 3D. The grief, the new job, the⁠—”

“The people,” I cut her off. “You mean the people.”

She doesn’t answer.

I look at her for a long moment, at the face I know better than almost anyone’s, and the green eyes that have been staring at me in dreams while I was on the other side of a country, telling myself there was nothing I could do for her.

This is Tessa. This is my best friend.

But the Tessa I knew would rather have died than ask someone to give up their life for her.